Zoo - vocals, piano, guitar
Zoo started playing piano at age 15 and immediately began writing songs. "I had no idea I had any musical potential as a kid. Turns out I was a talented, and progressed very quickly in developing the technique to play classical music once I started lessons. I was playing Mozart Sonatas, Bach Preludes and Fugues, and Chopin Etudes within a year of starting out." Within 2 years, he was accepted to the North Carolina School of the Arts in piano, where he earned a degree in classical piano performance. Upon leaving college, he turned again to songwriting. "It had always felt natural to compose and write songs, but while I was studying piano at college, there was so little time for anything else. Pursuing classical development is an all consuming task, full of 6-7 hour practice days in addition to your classes and schoolwork. But once I was out of school, I started building my first studio, with one keyboard, a mic, a little 4 track cassette recorder, and a guitar." Zoo has few memories of his father, but one of them was of him playing guitar. "I romanticized it in the way kids do, both with their fathers, and also with memories in general. I took some lessons, and studied some books, and of course practiced, and now I feel at home on a guitar, and that is a nice feeling."
"I played in other people's bands for while, notably as the piano player in Kind of Blue, and then as the bassist in Suitcase. I went solo and started doing long shows of my original material at coffee shops and restaurants. I found that I had been wanting to do that for a long time. I had written all this material and it had no place to be yet, since I wasn't a lead writer in the other bands. I started pulling together musicians to play my songs, and the lineup has gone through a lot of changes, as I play with different friends and mentor my music students in the band setting (I've had three of my students perform and tour with me in the band). I've been looking for musical partners where we can blend into sums greater than our parts, and I finally found that in Jason Faylen. We had been circling around each other for many years in the local scene, but never connecting. Right after Joe Next Door's 2009 tour out to Austin and back, we were playing a local show, and he came up and offered to play bass if I ever needed it. Well, my former student and current bassist was about to leave for college, and Jason stepped in. It has been amazing to hear how he interprets the songs, and rest on the bed of sound that he lays down. He plays with his hands a bass he built with his hands, and I play with my hands songs I crafted with my hands, and between us we sculpt the drama and intensity of the songs into vivid shapes much bigger than you'd expect from just two guys, and four hands."
Joe Next Door, in the refined essence of the duo Zoo and Jason, live in the space between songwriter and rock band, effortlessly slipping from intimate moments of classical delicacy to intense soaring walls of sound. They write quirky yet accessible art pop/rock songs, but as a band they happily defy categorization with a wide range of energy swooping well beneath what most solo songwriters can do, and well into the sonic space owned by much larger ensembles.